Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of News Item titled "2 killed in blast at illegal cracker unit in Thanjavur appearing in The Hindu dated 19.05.2025". The application is registered suo-motu on the basis of the news item titled 2 killed in blast at illegal cracker unit …
WHITE House sources indicate a department of labour (DOL) project to ease immigration rules for professionals in selected industries may be scrapped following objections that it would worsen the lot of unemployed Americans. A host of industry groups led by the American Federation of Labour-Confederation of Industrial Organisations -- the …
LED BY giants Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco, the US tobacco industry has sued the environmental protection agency (EPA), claiming its report on passive smoking -- the inhalation of exhaled cigarette smoke -- was unscientific and arbitrary. The EPA report, published in January, classified exhaled tobacco smoke in the most-serious …
AS PART of a plan to improve the effectiveness of its lending, the World Bank has raised by 12 per cent the budget for its supervision activities for the current year. To manage projects better, the Bank intends to classify them according to country instead of project by project. The …
IRAQ'S nuclear weapons programme has "been pounded into the ground by bombs, inspections and disruptions," says Robert Kelly, the leader of an International Atomic Energy Agency inspection team. Kelly said there was no point in keeping UN sanctions against Iraq in place solely for dismantling the country's nuclear programme because …
PERHAPS economics started off on the wrong foot with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Its early emphasis was on the process of creation of wealth as an outcome of humankind's toil against nature. This assumption of an antithetical relationship between humankind and nature has coloured much of traditional economic analyses …
BASED on a study by a Dutch academic, this book attempts to analyse variations in female employment by examining a cross-section of different forms of production and estimating their impact on women's bargaining power within the household. It suffers, however, from a major weakness: It dwells at length on the …
THOUGH one dislikes pessimists who seem to have given up on our collective ability to put development onto a genuinely sustainable path, the fact remains they have enough evidence to demonstrate their case. The pace of destruction continues to outstrip our paltry efforts to limit the social and environmental impacts …
Human-induced changes in the composition of the atmosphere has lent urgency to the task of understanding their effect on the earth's climate, which is crucial to life on the planet. Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas found in abundance on earth, has increased by more than 25 per …
PALAEOCLIMATIC data -- geological evidence of climatic change contained in fossils, rocks, sediments and ice -- play a crucial role in studies of atmospheric changes and their effect on climate because it is the only empirical evidence of what happened in the past. Such data serve as a yardstick to …
COMPARISONS between planets in the Solar System, which have distinct atmospheres, especially Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, cast light on the massive interactions that determine the evolution of climates. Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, has an extremely tenuous atmosphere, consisting mainly of hydrogen, helium and nitrogen, which are …
YOU DON'T have to be a smoker or tobacco chewer to be at risk of cancer from tobacco. Just handling large amounts of raw or processed tobacco can lead to changes in human cells, which give rise to uncontrolled cancerous growths. Rajani Bhisey and her team at Bombay's Cancer Research …
INDIAN Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials are not unduly worried by the stalled transfer of cryogenic rocket technology from Russia to India. They believe alternative cryogenic engine technology, which uses supercooled gases to fuel rockets, can be developed indigenously if Russia gives in to US pressure and withholds the transfer …
OUT OF sight, out of mind. Perhaps that is why the depletion and degradation of groundwater throughout India has gone virtually unnoticed while much concern has been expressed over the condition of surface water resources. The crisis created by falling groundwater levels has grabbed the attention of only the immediate …
"JODHPUR has a future only if the Indira Gandhi canal is brought till here," says J Venkateshwarlu, director of the Central Arid Zone Research Institute. Come it certainly will, but no one will vouch for the ability of the Jodhpur branch of the canal to deliver sufficient water to the …
THE PLIGHT of the people of Bichhri, whose groundwater was rendered unfit for consumption by the effluent discharge from Silver Chemicals Ltd, may have been forgotten in Udaipur, with the case moving at snail's pace through the courts. But the industrial threat to the area's groundwater has not receded. Now, …
Before the Green Revolution of the early 1970s, the farmers of Junagadh district on the Saurashtra coast set records in agricultural production. They boast of having done as well as their north Indian counterparts in producing oilseeds, groundnuts, sugarcane, bananas and even wheat. But today, many of them -- particularly …
IN THE wake of a severe drought in Jodhpur in 1970, the public health engineering department (PHED) decided to obtain water from the countryside around the city as an emergency measure. Rampura-Mathania was chosen because of its high water table. The PHED installed 26 tubewells in Rampura-Mathania with a total …
IS INDIAN industry becoming more pollution-intensive? Consider the production levels of some of the most polluting industries: Gross output of the paper and paper products industry and related activities increased from Rs 450 crore in 1970-71 to Rs 4,807 crore in 1988-89; that of leather and leather and fur products …
EVEN AS Japanese computer firms plan to shift production of their personal computers to Taiwan in order to reduce costs, Microsoft Corp of the US has launched a Japanese version of its Windows 3.1 software package in an effort to dominate the world's second-largest personal computer (PC) market. This is …
EVEN AS the world prepared to celebrate Environment Day on June 5, environmentalists in Karnataka filed a complaint against the state pollution control board (SPCB) for failing to discharge their duties under the Water Act, 1974, and the Air Act, 1981. On May 11, Ram M Apte, an advocate and …
